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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
SCIENTISTS SEEK TO CREATE THEIR
OWN SUPERHIGHWAY
Many researchers and scientists, desperate to conduct serious research, are
frustrated by the Internet's enormous popularity and congested traffic. They
have subsequently begun to plan a new superhighway solely for themselves.
An $80 million fiber-optic network, the National LambdaRail system is being
considered the Internet of the future by many and is hoped to revolutionize
the sharing of information.
Information will be measured in billions of bits per second, and beams of
light will carry this information instantly across the country.
In November, supercomputing centers in Chicago and Pittsburgh were the
first
be connected by a 674-mile section of the National LambdaRail. 10,000 miles
of fiber will be added over the next year by a large group of companies and
universities interested in creating the largest and fastest landmark research
network in the world.
The catch is that only the scientific community will have access to the
National LambdaRail. However, the efforts will affect future networking
projects, possibly leading to incredible advances in medicine, business, and
entertainment.
Atlanta and Washington should be connected by the superhighway by April of
2004. Atlanta to Dallas and Atlanta to Jacksonville sections will follow
shortly afterwards.
Georgia Tech, the only Atlanta member of the developing consortium, plans
to
make resources available to over 20 colleges throughout the state through the
use of an electronic "on ramp" which they plan to manage.
Scientists are creating LamdaRail because the Internet's increased
congestion
and high level of security breaches compromise the serious research
efforts.
In addition, the Internet cannot keep pace with the high powered computers
that use it or the large amounts of information that scientists seek to
access. Scientists, along with consumers, are increasingly needing and
wanting higher amounts of bandwidth to access these large amounts of data.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, for instance, reported this
year
that its total holdings -- atmosphere, ocean and weather information spanning
more than a century -- had reached a petabyte in size, roughly 100 times the
contents of the Library of Congress. By next year it will total two
petabytes.
National LambdaRail will change the equation. Each strand of
transcontinental
glass fiber will be able to carry 40 channels of information on a different
wavelength, for which the scientific symbol is the Greek letter lambda. That's
400 billion bits of data a second -- the contents of a library floor of books,
250 high-definition television images or 5 million simultaneous phone
conversations.
Such huge computing power, like the NSF's TeraGrid, could tackle tasks that
demand trillions, or even quadrillions, of computations a second such as
digital sky surveys, genome research, earthquake simulation, and climate
modeling.
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